The Carnal Prayer Mat - Rou Putuan by Li Yu tr with an intro & notes by Patrick Hanan.pdf

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THE CARNAL PRAYER MAT (ROU PUTUAN)
LI YU
TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES, BY
PATRICK HANAN
An Available Press Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Translation, notes, and introduction
copyright © 1990 by Patrick Hanan
All rights reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harvard University Press for
permission to reprint an excerpt from
The Invention of Li Yu
by
Patrick Hanan. Copyright © 1988 by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-91506
ISBN: 0-345-36508-9
Text design by Holly Johnson
Cover design by James R. Harris
Cover illustration:
Whiling Away the Summer
by Yin Chi, one of twelve
album leaves, 19th century.
Courtesy of Sydney L. Moss Ltd.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: August 1990
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
About the Author
About the Translator
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INTRODUCTION
What first attracted me to Li Yu was his love of
comic invention. “Broadly speaking,” he once wrote
to a friend, “everything I have ever written was
intended to make people laugh.” He was never
content, as other writers were, to make minor
variations upon the standard literary themes. Instead
he submitted those themes to a drastic overhaul and
created a new comedy of his own, claiming all the
while that his version of reality was the true one and
that everybody else was deluded. He thus belongs to
that rare breed of comic writer—rare in any
culture—who discovers or invents the terms of his
own reality.[1]
Let me give two obvious examples, both of them
discoveries rather than inventions. In its most
general outline a Chinese romantic comedy consisted
of a handsome youth with brilliant literary gifts
falling in love with a beautiful and talented girl and,
after overcoming a number of vicissitudes, marrying
her. By the seventeenth century countless stories
and plays, some of them masterpieces, had been
written to this formula. But Li Yu would have none
of it. In his first play (or opera, both terms apply),
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